Month: March 2009

Recently we implemented proxy authentication and lot some amount of content filtering at my college. Several people here are using wget as the download manager. Here is how you make wget work behind the proxy.

sunil@debianserver:~$ export http_proxy=192.168.0.5:3128

( Replace with your proxy ip and port).

You can specify the proxy user name and password on command line as below.

wget –proxy-user “yourusername” –proxy-passwd=”xxxxxxx” URL

If you are tired of typing the above everytime you login, make an alias entry in ~/.bashrc

alias wget='wget --proxy-user "yourusername" --proxy-passwd="xxxxxx"'
The export_proxy line can also be put into .bashrc .
This is a potential security risk as any one can read your .bashrc ( the default .bashrc permission is rrw-r--r--) is or he can look for your process id in the /proc
directory and find out the command line arguments.

During my stay in Hyderabad , I had the opportunity to visit a wonderful institute named kite colleges. It is, in fact, two colleges situated in same campus. The colleges started functioning this year. At present only first year classes are going on. They are located approximately 60km from Hyderabad in the Ranga Reddy district.

The college is amazing in many ways given the quality of teaching and infrastructure in most of the private/government colleges in India. First of all, the management seems to have a vision on the future of the colleges and seems to be committed to implementing it. Secondly, they have invested lot of capital to fulfil the vision,

When I visited the college, at the instance of Mr. Ramesh who is aptly designated as the technology officer of the college, I was expecting a normal college with all the gimmicks to attract parents. When I was shown the facilities I was rather wonderstruck.

All the class rooms are world class with modern furniture and equipped with projectors. The computer center has lots of Dell machines ( which Ramesh says is of industrial quality) The computer center is so well designed and will be a neighbors envy.

On the electronics front they have several Agilent DSOs ( we have only one :( ) and most of the other equipments imported. The furniture at electronics lab is also worth mention.

The college is at present powered with two 2 MBPS lines. They have a blade server with 6 blades which runs a variety of services.

What impressed me most was the methodology of teaching.:- learning by doing. It was most evident in their IT workshop where you can learn a lot of thing by actually doing it. I believe that this is the right methodology to learn anything.

The college runs some BPO services which enables students to work and pay for their fees like in western countries. Students manage canteen , gardening and lot of other services.

The institution is only in its first year. The vision of management in building up a world class institution seems to be working. I don’t know whether the present structure and activities will scale up when it becomes a full fledged college.

The students are all accommodated in the campus. I have not spoken to any students during my visit ( which I should have ). I would like to hear how the students and faculty find this innovative institution.